JUST PUBLISHED: The New Comic Book Helping Europe Talk to Children About Cancer
I have spent my career treating cancer in some of the busiest hospitals in Europe, all within the UK, and one lesson has been constant: a diagnosis rarely affects just one person. It echoes through a household, a classroom, a circle of friends. As an adult oncologist, I meet countless parents who struggle not only with their illness but with the impossible task of explaining it to young children who sense far more than they can articulate.
Although I do not treat paediatric patients directly, I have witnessed the emotional challenges that children with cancer face through another lens, my own life. Over the years, among family and friends, I have met many children undergoing treatment for cancer. Their parents often confided in me, not as their doctor, but as someone they trusted: someone who writes about cancer with clarity and compassion. They spoke about the difficulty of finding words that would not terrify their child, the struggle to explain chemotherapy without reducing hope, and the discomfort of raising these deeply personal concerns in brief, medically focused consultations. More than once, parents urged me to create something that could make cancer less frightening and its treatment a more understandable tool that could help children feel informed rather than overwhelmed. Those conversations were the earliest sparks of what eventually became this project.
These experiences, both professional and personal, reveal a gap in our public-health system that no staging guideline or chemotherapy protocol can fix. Europe prides itself on excellence in healthcare, literacy, and science communication, yet children remain the most underserved audience in cancer education. Our campaigns speak clearly to adults. Our schools teach hygiene, nutrition and basic biology. But the deeper realities that shape lifelong wellbeing, how illness works, how bodies heal, what treatment involves, and why early habits matter, are rarely addressed. Parents are left improvising. Teachers feel unequipped. Clinicians like me often end up translating medicine into the simplest possible terms, wishing there were more child-friendly tools to bridge the gap.
This is the environment in which our new comic book series, Ella and Fella, was born. The idea grew from years of wishing I had something meaningful to place in families’ hands, something that would respect a child’s intelligence without frightening them, and that would remain scientifically accurate. Europe has a long tradition of learning through pictures, from Tintin to Asterix to the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées. Graphic storytelling is woven into the continent’s cultural DNA. Children decode imagery and humour long before they can parse a medical leaflet. A comic is not a lesser medium. It is often the most natural one.
When I began collaborating with the artist Nigar Nazar, our ambition was straightforward: to create characters who feel as though they belong in a European child’s world. The values at the heart of the stories, empathy, resilience, curiosity, kindness, and scientific literacy, come directly from what I see in my adult patients’ families every day. Children can absorb complex ideas when those ideas are delivered honestly and compassionately. The series reflects the topics that arise repeatedly in clinical rooms: cancer treatment, mental health, grief, gratitude, circadian biology, and the importance of morning light, healthy eating, emotional intelligence, and the central question every family faces: how do we navigate illness together?
My motivation is reinforced by what I see in epidemiology. Europe spends vast resources on late-stage cancer treatment, and then more on public-health campaigns aimed at adults who already carry decades of behavioural risk. But the habits that shape cancer risk, diet, sleep, stress, inactivity, and alcohol often form in childhood. By adulthood, they are difficult to uproot. “Communicating health early is not optional; it’s urgent.” This is not rhetoric. It is a clinical reality.
A project like Ella and Fella succeeds because it aligns with the very priorities Europe has already set: early health literacy, mental-health awareness, family-centred care, prevention over cure, multimedia learning, community resilience, and scientific accuracy. These are not abstract policy ambitions. They are the principles that frame every conversation I have with adults who are trying to protect their children while coping with their own diagnosis.
Europe has led medical revolutions before. It can lead to this one as well, not through new machinery or pharmaceuticals, but through a new language for its youngest citizens. If we want healthier adults, we must speak to children now, with clarity, honesty, and imagination. That is the purpose of this work, and it is the lesson my patients, and their families, have taught me over many years.
